How To Use The Cloud To Improve Customer Engagement

What will you do with the additional resources available due to running apps in the cloud? Plow them back into customer engagement. But not scattershot – now you can target your efforts very precisely and maximize the impact of every investment in customer engagement.

Scale up quickly when your new service is a hit.

With traditional infrastructure, you scale by purchasing new capacity (buying more servers, storage systems, switches and routers). Most of those resources end up under-utilized most of the time. With the cloud you scale by clicking the appropriate boxes on the service provider’s website. You can scale instantly, massively, and seamlessly when one of your new customer engagement web apps is a big hit; and you can scale back down just as quickly and easily.

Launch more creative, personalized and successful campaigns.

The cloud makes it economically practical to create, deploy and track highly targeted promotions and campaigns that truly engage consumers and get them to experience your products and services more deeply and personally.

Prior to the cloud, if you wanted to connect with a specific group of consumers – pet owners, rock climbers, Civil War buffs, etc. – you did your market research and conducted focus groups, formulated your campaign strategy, developed and tested various creative approaches, rolled them out in pilot programs, refined them based on feedback, expanded the program, and tracked the results. It all took forever and cost a small fortune.

The cloud shortens and streamlines many of these processes and lets you get closer to your target consumers faster and with far less expense. Let’s say you want to engage with mothers of young children. With the cloud you can build and host a privately managed online community where moms can come together and exchange opinions, tastes, preferences, tips and advice with each other and with marketers. The ideas pour in. Let’s say you discover that moms have a high level of interest in toys that involve more physical exercise. You can tailor not only your product development efforts but also your customer engagement activities to this expressed preference. You can use cloud apps and Software-as-a-Service offerings to develop your targeted campaign ideas and deploy your email marketing, social media marketing, “post-click” marketing, and so on. And you can harness the wealth of cloud-based analytics tools, SEO optimization tools, and pay-per-click management apps to track, refine, and optimize your campaign virtually in real time.

The cloud also has given rise to “gamification” as a customer engagement tactic. Gamification turns traditional one-way communication into an interactive game where the customer is an active participant. Engine Yard, for example, has used gamification to transform its customer support ticketing system from a reactive function into an active, unified community where all users can learn, teach, and support one another. Users are recognized for contributing, creating or commenting on forum documentation, reporting bugs and requesting enhancements. The results include a 50% increase in forum views and a 40% reduction in new ticket resolution time. The ticket-per-customer ratio has decreased 18% in 90 days.

Leaders in Cloud-based Customer Engagement

While customer engagement missteps may figure most prominently in our memories, we should also recognize the progress many companies are making in improving their customer engagement practices. Here are just a few examples of companies that have leveraged the cloud to create innovations in customer engagement.

Amazon.com: Launched a website called MYHABIT, a members-only fashion site offering up to 60% off what it calls “hand-picked selections” from “sought-after brands.” Other touted perks include “fast, free shipping; free, easy returns on returnable items; 360-degree video footage and lavish custom photos of the merchandise; and world-class customer service.” This site along with the new mobile app is clearly aimed at increasing engagement and loyalty among a select segment of shoppers who have already demonstrated specific preferences and tastes.

Get Satisfaction: Powers 65,000 customer communities for companies of all sizes and over 4 million registered users interact with top global brands on Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction lets companies quickly set up an online customer community to engage with customers anywhere they are: the company’s website, Facebook, search or mobile devices. Customers range from SMB to Fortune 500: Microsoft, Tri-Net, Mint, Rhapsody, StumbleUpon and many others.

Opterus: Built the “Store Ops-Center,” an on-demand, web-based retail portal that connects corporate offices with retail locations, so corporate policy can be more clearly communicated and store personnel can receive clear, concise and timely direction, along with the proper tools to best do their jobs to support corporate initiatives.

How to Make Your Move to the Cloud

Using the cloud to bolster customer engagement does not have to be a daunting task. Here are three things you can do right away to get started:

Start measuring customer engagement.

Historically, one of the key impediments to successful customer engagement has been lack of measurement. This is due in part to the fact that each company has very specific—and very different—variables to measure. Industry-standard benchmarks such as Net Promoter Score or the CE Metric are a good first step, but they provide only a very high-level view of customer engagement performance.

The cloud makes it economically practical to measure and track many elements of customer engagement with fine granularity. For example, how long is the average visit to the web site? Which content tends to be viewed first? When do customers call us? What makes them angry? How often do they leave the site before they purchase something? How many are logging in via mobile devices and how does that impact sales? A wealth of cloud-based analytics tools have emerged from a broad spectrum of vendors, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Quantcast Measurement, KISSmetrics, GetClicky, New Relic, CrazyEgg, and many more. It pays to investigate these tools and start measuring and monitoring every aspect of customer engagement.

Use your measurements to identify key areas for improvement.

Analytics tools will help you see what’s working, what isn’t, and where you have the greatest opportunity for improving customer engagement–whether that’s a type of service, a specific department, line of business, employee groups, or job function. It will also help you see where innovation is most needed, and which types of applications could be most positively impacted by a move to the cloud.

Meet with a cloud provider to understand your options.

There’s no need for an exhaustive vendor selection process at this point—just learn how the cloud could benefit your customer engagement efforts, what new skills your employees may need to take full advantage of the cloud model, and how the cloud could create new opportunities for customer engagement you may not have explored yet.

Engagement. Satisfaction. Loyalty. Profits. All Connected–and All Increased by the Cloud.

Thousands of articles have been published about the advent of the cloud and its potential for business transformation. The vast majority of these articles focus only on the most obvious benefits of the cloud: efficiency, business agility and potential cost savings. But the hidden value of the cloud – its role in accelerating the innovation that leads to superior customer engagement and new sources of competitive differentiation – will prove to be even more valuable.

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